The UFO Is Fake in Animator’s YouTube Prank — But So Is Everything Else

A concept drawing of the small scout ship seen in "UFO Over Santa Clarita."

This concept art looks like something out of Battlestar Galactica.

More concept art from "UFO Over Santa Clarita."

The small UFO was designed by Yuri Blagoveschenskiy.

Concept art of the massive mothership.

Final concept art of the mothership.

The mothership was designed by Leonardo Kradjen.

"The complex, compound-curved forms of the ships proved to be a challenge when building the CG models," director Tsirbas said.

A wireframe from "UFO Over Santa Clarita" shows how the car interior was developed.

Another wireframe of the car's dashboard.

The CG model of the car interior.

A wireframe of the car interior with a roughed-in spaceship visible in the sky outside.

The computer-generated hand models look incredibly lifelike.

"The hand models are all CGI," said Tsirbas. "Sadly they're very underexposed in the final comp since they're in such a dark section of the car."

A dissected chicken provided inspiration for the alien ships in "UFO Over Santa Clarita."

The UFO video starts like so many others on YouTube: An unimpressive feed from a handheld camera, jostled around within a moving car. There’s random background noise, then an expression of disbelief as the amateur filmmaker spots a spacecraft and tracks its path across the evening sky.

Suddenly, another ship appears as if out of the ether: a gigantic mothership that vanishes a few seconds later in a wisp of clouds.

YouTube viewers called BS almost immediately on the clip, which was titled “UFO Over Santa Clarita” and uploaded late last year. Many complimented the filmmakers’ digital craftsmanship and suggested they should head to Hollywood, where their CGI work could be put to good use creating alien ships. “I give an E for entertainment effort, but nothing for authenticity,” commented Youtube user Twister6424.

The skeptics couldn’t have been more right. But while the highly detailed alien ships were obviously fake, the even more surprising thing about the clip is that nothing else was real either. Every single element in the 39-second clip was computer-generated, from the car the supposed cameraman is driving to the cloudy blue sky where the alien crafts appear.

In reality, “UFO Over Santa Clarita” was a painstakingly crafted joke played by Aristomenis “Meni” Tsirbas, the director of the 2007 computer-animated film Battle for Terra who has also contributed visual effects and animation work to movies like Titanic and Hellboy and several Star Trek television series. A long-time champion of “photorealistic” CGI, Tsirbas and his team spent about four months mimicking the look of an accidental extraterrestrial encounter captured on a smartphone.

And until now, Tsirbas hadn’t revealed the truth to anyone outside a handful of friends.

“The point of the video was to prove that CGI can look natural and convincing,” Tsirbas told Wired. “Everybody assumes the background and car are real, and that the UFOs are probably fake, especially the over-the-top mothership at the end. The general reaction is disbelief, so I usually have to prove it by showing a wireframe of the entire shot to prove that nothing is real.”

With computer-generated imagery increasingly prevalent in movies and TV shows, “CGI sucks” has become a rallying cry for some movie purists, fans of practical effects and others irritated by the endless tweaking that digital technology allows. At the same time, modern computers and software put powerful CGI tools in the hands of the masses, making it virtually impossible to tell at first glance what is real and what is the work of a digital wizard.

Ironically, Tsirbas says that making the photorealistic car and desert environment was even more difficult than crafting the alien crafts, and took the lion’s share of effort on “UFO Over Santa Clarita” project, which has been viewed nearly 80,000 times on his MeniThings YouTube page and on Vimeo.

“Without a doubt the ‘real’ stuff was the toughest because everybody knows what an actual car driving down a desert should look like,” said Tsirbas, who is currently working on secret projects at Blur Studio while writing a script for his next feature film. “The digital versions either worked or they didn’t. Getting it ‘mostly’ right wasn’t good enough. We had to nail the car and desert perfectly, otherwise the gag wouldn’t work.”

To pull off the hoax, Tsirbas worked with students from the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, where he taught filmmaking classes and served as resident director of an original content division called Gnomon Studios. For his short film Exoids, another Gnomon Studios project, he hand-picked a crew of students to make the action-packed story of a post-apocalyptic, speed-demon slug who squares off against some rather aggro robots.

There are several tricks to succeeding with this sort of digital sleight of hand, said Tsirbas. “First and foremost, the digital models needed to be very well built. The trick is to not just construct enough detail, but to build in the subtle imperfections and ‘softness’ found in reality. So corners weren’t perfectly sharp, and seams had varying width.” (See concept art and other behind-the-scenes materials in the gallery above.)

Realistic lighting also played an important role in making “UFO Over Santa Clarita” look like a well-done deception.

“Often CGI is too perfectly and uniformly exposed, when reality has things blowing out or falling into darkness all over the place,” said the Los Angeles-based director. “The car interior was a beautiful model, but I deliberately crunched down that element in the composite until it was almost entirely black, because a real camera would do the same if exposing for the sky.”

Finally, Tsirbas animated the camera to give the shot “plenty of bump and shake, just like a real camera,” and add a “messy synthetic lens flare” whenever the sun crept into the frame.

To come up with the look for the spaceships, Tsirbas used a rather strange earthly reference material: He instructed his crew to photograph a chicken carcass “at various angles and stages of distress,” then symmetrize the images in Photoshop to come up with “complex organic shapes.”

“It was a cool but rather disgusting part of the design process,” said Tsirbas.